"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" - The Atlantic

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Magazine - The Atlantic

This is an interesting article I came across while doing some research on Google itself. The main idea of the article is the author's belief that Google and other technologies are changing the way we think. He writes that since the advent of Google, he has had more and more trouble with staying immersed in long readings. He says that he used to be able to sit down and read a book for multiple hours at a time, but now he has trouble making it through a couple chapters. And he isn't the only one who has experienced this; he includes a couple anecdotes of friends of his who have experienced the same problem. After reading this article, I noticed that I share these experiences. I remember being able to sit and read half a book or even more in one sitting. Now, I can only read a few chapters, before I feel like I have to move on to something else.

Before Google was invented, to do research you had to spend time in the library, looking through books and magazine articles, often taking weeks to complete a research project. When you found something you could use, you had to read through most of the book or article to find what you were looking for. After Google was invented, you could find what you were looking for in a very short amount of time. Not only that, now you can find excerpts or even entire books on Google Books, and without having to read the whole thing, you can find the relevant passages. On Wikipedia, you can click through to the source links and usually find more on the topic, such as an entire report or article about the subject. Many students realized that projects that took days or weeks to do, could now be done in a couple days or even less. Many people in my age group that I have spoken with have noticed that since Google came about, they have allotted less and less time to research. I wouldn't say that Google is making us stupid, since it provides us a wealth of information, but I think that at the very least it is changing how our brains are wired to concentrate and focus for long periods of time, and at the very worst it is making us lazier. I say this because if something isn't immediately found in Google or elsewhere on the Internet, then, in my experience, a lot of students tend to either give up, or claim they can't find anything about the subject. Ways to avoid this could include classes that teach how to use different research sources and materials effectively. If it were made part of the general college curriculum, or mandatory to high school seniors about to graduate, then I believe that an increasingly larger part of the population would have skills that can be used in most jobs.